Four days in Doha: a very small country buying itself a very large culture

Go to the souq at dusk on the first night and do not plan anything else. Souq Waqif has been the market on this spot for well over a century, and what stands now is a thorough rebuild begun in 2006 that stripped out the concrete additions and put back mud render, exposed timber beams and lantern-lit alleys. Purists call it a reconstruction. It is also, unarguably, where Doha actually goes in the evening, and the alleys are full of families, shisha smoke and men selling spices, fabric, sweets and camel wool.

Two corners are worth hunting for. The falcon souq, on the northern edge, sells hunting birds for the price of a car and has a falcon hospital next to it; you can walk in, and there will be a row of hooded birds on perches. Nearby are the stables of the Amiri Guard, whose horses come out in the evening and are extremely good tempered about being photographed.

At the eastern end of the car park stands Al Koot, a square white fort built in 1880 during the Ottoman period, when this was the edge of town and the fort watched over the market. It is floodlit, small and takes twenty minutes. Then walk five minutes north to the gold souq, a covered arcade of jewellers where the gold price is regulated and displayed and the windows are stacked to the ceiling.

The Museum of Islamic Art is the best building in the Gulf and the reason to come. I.M. Pei was in his late eighties, retired, and refused the commission until he was allowed to spend months travelling the Islamic world for a form he could use. He found it in the ablution fountain of the Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo, and built a five storey stack of cream limestone cubes that shift and rotate as they rise, standing on its own artificial island sixty metres offshore so that nothing could ever be built next to it. Inside, an atrium runs the full height under a domed oculus, and one enormous window frames West Bay across the water.

The collection matches it: ceramics, manuscripts, astrolabes, ivory and metalwork from Spain to India across twelve centuries, displayed sparsely enough that you look at individual objects rather than cases. Two hours minimum, three if you slow down.

Come out into MIA Park, which occupies the reclaimed spit leading to the island and has the best view of the skyline in the city, then walk the corniche. It curves seven kilometres round the bay, and the traditional wooden dhows moored along the southern end still take passengers out for an hour on the water in the evening, which is by some distance the best way to see West Bay light up.

The National Museum of Qatar opened in 2019 and looks like nothing else on earth: Jean Nouvel took the desert rose, the crystal that forms in salty sand, and built the thing out of 316 interlocking discs of sand-coloured concrete leaning against each other. It wraps right around the restored palace of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, built in 1906, which sits in the courtyard as the last exhibit. Inside there are almost no straight walls and no rectangular rooms; the galleries run as one continuous curving route through the geology, the Bedouin and pearling economy, the arrival of oil and the modern state, with wall-sized film projected onto the slanting concrete. It is more immersive than informative and it works.

In the afternoon go to Msheireb, the rebuilt downtown district, for four restored courtyard houses that have been turned into small museums. Radwani House is domestic life before and after oil; Company House covers the first oil workers; Mohammed bin Jassim House is about the rebuilding of the district itself. The fourth, Bin Jelmood House, is about slavery in the Indian Ocean world, including in Qatar, and it is unusually direct about it for a state-funded museum in a Gulf country. That alone makes the visit worth the hour.

Finish north at Katara, a purpose-built cultural village of 2010 done up as a traditional Qatari settlement, with pigeon towers, a Greek-style amphitheatre on the shore, galleries, a mosque tiled in gold and a great many restaurants. It is entirely artificial and entirely pleasant, particularly after dark.

Spend the last morning in Education City, the campus district west of the centre where Qatar has installed satellites of several American and European universities. Two things there are worth the drive.

The Qatar National Library, opened in 2018, is Rem Koolhaas's, and the idea is simple and startling: a single vast room under a folded roof, with the shelves rising away from you on stepped terraces so that you can see every book in the building at once. In the middle of the floor the ground has been cut away into a sunken marble trench, lit like an excavation, and that is where the manuscripts and the antique maps are kept. Anyone can walk in.

Five minutes away, in front of the Sidra hospital, stands The Miraculous Journey: fourteen monumental bronzes by Damien Hirst tracking a foetus from conception to birth, the last one a fourteen metre newborn. They were installed in 2013, covered over for several years, and unveiled again in 2018. Whatever you think of Hirst, a row of anatomical bronzes on that scale outside a maternity hospital in the Gulf is not something you will see anywhere else.

The airport is half an hour east from there, which makes this a comfortable morning before an afternoon flight.